For Americans, the future is always coming, shiny, amazing, and prosperous. Our founders were optimists. Every generation of Americans has held onto the idea that we’re getting better, moving toward the music of our better angels, fixing the bugs, hacking the new code, and building a better tomorrow.
Trump’s view is fundamentally pessimistic; it’s a picture of America in decline, of evil foreigners beating us at trade, of problems only a strongman can solve, and the idea that the amorphous “left” is winning all the battles. This isn’t Reagan’s sunny optimism; it’s depressingly small and limited in scope. The Trump Train stops in a podunk future that looks like 1930, not 2030.
Big, visionary, prospective leadership has always been informed by the bull-headed optimism that defines this country. We aren’t just passengers; we’re builders, dreamers, doers, fighters. No challenge is too big. No problem to complex. Every time the world thinks we can’t, we do. “America, heck yeah” has become “Daddy, save us!” in the age of Trump.
Trump has trained his followers to believe in an America that is weaker, sadder, and smaller than we really are. Biden is optimistic about America, our rich talent and our amazing, messy, wonderful, ridiculous, crazy, passionate people. It’s too bad a central tenet of Trump’s view of the United States is to run down the people of this country and describe a nation so lost and weak it requires an authoritarian strongman. We don’t.
Peggy Perkins Winder